Good on Morrissey for pursuing his libel claim against the NME after an article in the trendy music magazine suggested he held racist views.

OVER-LOOKED: Morrissey has had no official recognition for his long career

Good on Morrissey for pursuing his libel claim against the NME after an article in the trendy music magazine suggested he held racist views.

The magazine has always seemed to me to be peopled by pseudo intellectual musos and I’m glad their geeky attempts to be cleverer than thou have come a cropper over inaccurate reporting.

Yet it’s a moral victory at best since the offending 2007 piece paved the way for a long-running debate in print and cyberspace over whether Morrissey is a racist with lines from songs he wrote, like Bengali in Platforms, dissected to the nth degree for ‘evidence’ for the prosecution.

The internet, in particular, is riddled with outrageous accusations against a man whose provocative statements about society and trenchant views about vegetarianism have made him at once one of the most pilloried and admired men in Britain.

In a BBC poll of the greatest living Briton, he came second to Sir David Attenborough, ahead of Sir Paul McCartney. In an M.E.N. poll of greatest living Mancunians, he came first.

And yet the spectre of racism hangs over him and, as a result, he is not given the credit he is due, not least by his home city. Universities up and down the land are gearing up to dish out honorary degrees like confetti to celebrities yet Morrissey remains curiously absent from the list of ‘stars’ given their cultural desserts by our local academic institutions.

Manchester Metropolitan University will be honouring Guy Garvey of Elbow, fair enough – a good egg, a multi award-winning talented musician who has never uttered anything remotely offensive. But Gethin Jones? How come he merits an honorary degree for his contribution to the cultural landscape?

He was rugby captain during this time as an MMU student, he had a stint on Blue Peter and he went out with opera’s prettiest primadonna, Katherine Jenkins – does this make him worthy?

Elbow frontman Garvey has also been given the Freedom of Bury, on the same ‘bill’ as Radcliffe-born film director Danny Boyle, after Slumdog Millionaire won a string of Oscars. So why doesn’t Morrissey merit similar civic recognition from the likes of his home borough of Trafford or neighbouring Manchester?

You can only think it’s either ignorance of his status among grey-haired councillors or the persistent, yet unfounded racist smears associated with his name or perhaps the worry that he might turn them down.

But mild-mannered appearances on BBC’s The One Show and Desert Island Discs in recent years show that he’s moved on from the Angry Young Man and is relatively at ease with himself and society in his middle years.

At the very least Trafford could honour him for services to vegetarianism since the movement’s headquarters are based there. The lack of local honours seems unjust for a man who, at 52, is still writing music, still playing packed out arenas around the world and still refusing to jump on the money-spinning reunion bandwagon like so many of his musical alma mater.

:: So Sam Faiers has soared to number one in the book charts. Ever heard of her? Well, if you happened to be watching ITV2 last night, you might have seen her in The Only Way Is Marbs.

In Essex language, Marbs means Marbella. Sam and her fellow The Only Way Is Essex bronzed bird-brains will have been betraying their lack of intelligence with every facile utterance.

Sam’s weightless work will have been ghost-written by some hard-pressed writer trying to make sense of a 21-year-old penning an autobiography.

But how depressing that such a book is at number one – and even more depressing that Sam says her audience is ‘young girls’ who look up to a woman with no depth apart from her tan.

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